Anyone ever tried computer recycling for resell?

So I've been able to get some really cheap computers from searching through craigslist and ebay. Then being able to resell them by taking nice pictures, putting a good description etc, and sometimes upgrading them.

I came across one guy who gave me his card says he does computer recycling and it got me thinking, I could just buy these in bulk at the cheapest price available then sell them.

I've googled this and it seems fairly easy to get started, but was wondering if anyone has had any experience first hand trying this out. I'm not sure if I should contact businesses directly or just how to establish a relationship with one. What a normal amount of computers would be available, and most importantly what normal prices are.

You can see if you have any actual recycling places in your area. If so you can usually get machines from them cheap that they haven't looked though yet.

Another option is government and education auctions. You can buy machines cheap but via the pallet and take the time to clean them up. There is money to be made doing it.

Last I'd say look at Microsoft's registered refurbisher program. It is a way to buy windows licenses pretty cheap to use when refurbing machines.

swatbat said:

You can see if you have any actual recycling places in your area. If so you can usually get machines from them cheap that they haven't looked though yet.

Another option is government and education auctions. You can buy machines cheap but via the pallet and take the time to clean them up. There is money to be made doing it.

Last I'd say look at Microsoft's registered refurbisher program. It is a way to buy windows licenses pretty cheap to use when refurbing machines.

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appreciate the response, this does help point me in the right direction. Didn't think of government auctions at all.

Also see if your local county or others have surplus sales. Years ago right out of high school one of my friends and I would wake up early and hit ours up(we are 33 now). At the time they were replacing their bay networks switches with cisco. They market was a lot stronger then. We would buy 24 and 48 port switches for under 25 bucks a shot and ebay them for like 150 to 250 bucks each. They also were getting rid of some cisco routers and we make easily like 200 bucks plus a unit. We sold some other computer parts as well. The old school guys that lived off auctions would always rush to the computer towers and notebooks so we just avoided them. Hell we could do basic tests on the switches there and it made us more money(we had the knowledge they didn't).

To give you an idea here is an example price pdf from my county.

http://henrico.us/assets/surpluspricelist.pdf

A guy I know that mostly sells arcade machines and multicades hit them up a few years ago as I pointed him to them(he bought every 19 inch computer crt they had at like a buck a shot to use in multicades as the boards take vga). At one point they pushed a lot of filing cabinets and he bought them up. Ended up making bank reselling them. If you have similar sales in your area it might not hurt to be willing to expand into some other options. He also got a bunch of aluminium lunch trays for next to nothing. Ended up making a fair profit on them and since he was already ebaying stuff it wasn't a big deal to sell them as well.


Level 1 did a video talking about where to find cheap machines not too long ago. Might be worth looking at.

That video was great. It's a shame that none of those recycling places exist in Columbus ohio, a very large city. I've called every single one I could find and none of them let you go through their stuff and the few that are offering bulk are using ebay prices bleh.

butterfliesrpretty said:

So I've been able to get some really cheap computers from searching through craigslist and ebay. Then being able to resell them by taking nice pictures, putting a good description etc, and sometimes upgrading them.

I came across one guy who gave me his card says he does computer recycling and it got me thinking, I could just buy these in bulk at the cheapest price available then sell them.

I've googled this and it seems fairly easy to get started, but was wondering if anyone has had any experience first hand trying this out. I'm not sure if I should contact businesses directly or just how to establish a relationship with one. What a normal amount of computers would be available, and most importantly what normal prices are.

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Honestly its not a new idea and plenty of people in my area have tried. Honestly because of how throw away things are now with technology and the rate at which things advance, there is no real market for this.

On top of that, there are some ethical issues. I am assuming you'd be fully disclosing you are taking these computers to refurbish and resell them?

jmilcher said:

Honestly its not a new idea and plenty of people in my area have tried. Honestly because of how throw away things are now with technology and the rate at which things advance, there is no real market for this.

On top of that, there are some ethical issues. I am assuming you'd be fully disclosing you are taking these computers to refurbish and resell them?

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I've already been making decent money doing it. It's none of their business what I do with the computers I buy from them. Also I think you might be thinking of recycling in the traditional sense. Computer recyclers give people money for their pc's typically companies that are upgrading all their stuff. Almost everyone I called is just turning around and selling them on ebay.

One thing to consider is waste. Heavy metals and other nefarious chemicals. Buying in bulk you will invariably accumulate dead components. My county landfill has a large bin for proper disposal. Perhaps you have a similar option.

We bought a few refurbished systems to save money where I work and a number of them have failed for various reasons. We also get a good number of donated systems and there are usually good reasons for them being donated. Way too many of these systems are either flakey, or they have bad hard drives, flakey network hardware, or they have other problems that are difficult to discover until someone uses the system for a while and has weird problems with it. I'm to the point that I wipe/destroy the drives and just sell these damned machines to the recycling yard down the street for $2 per system.

I could never ethically sell a flakey system to someone who is going to try to use it and the systems that aren't flakey and still usable, we use. There are a number of P4 systems still in use here that work just fine as office machines.

Modern equivalent of yesterday's junk dealer, IMO. When I was a kid we had a guy down the road - Freddie Lazarro - had a small scrapyard and a beat up 30 year old pickup truck. Went around picking up junk, selling a lot as scrap, fixing things like old lamps and washing machines and vacuum cleaners, reselling them for a few bucks.

It's gotta be a tough living given the time and energy needed to buy, clean, fix and sell a system to make just a few bucks on it. Dealing with buyers coming to your home, or maybe worse - meeting them in parking lots - has to be both time consuming and must get old. You could probably make a whole lot more (although there's a lot of competition) buying, refurbishing and reselling phones on ebay.